Assisted suicide is deeply problematic because it opens up the near-certainty of abuse.

That’s why Parliament has debated and dismissed it.

Of course people are terrified of being trapped inside a useless body or suffering from a dreadful terminal disease. But no one has the right to expect another person to help someone kill themself.

Suicide is not dying, and assisted suicide is not ‘helping someone to die’. It is assisting self-killing.

The current law is necessarily nuanced and humane. It makes assisted suicide illegal because of the overwhelming necessity to protect vulnerable people from being put under pressure to end their lives.

At the same time, as the Director of Public Prosecutions has made clear, the law is not used to criminalise those who through wholly compassionate and disinterested motives assist people to kill themselves.

Legalising assisted suicide would end such protection and turn doctors into death-dealers. Death can never be a therapeutic procedure. It can never be in society’s interests that medicine should be turned into a death service.